There's suddenly 70+ Viscous Horror across horde AHs, up from ~10 a week ago. Many of the sellers are nonsense names and are only selling Viscous Horror (or occasionally, VH plus Dragon Kite/EST/spectral tiger cub), and the price is clustered very tightly at 80k or sometimes 85k.

Obviously this is not conclusive proof of anything, but it's very suspicious. This is the same pattern we saw for cubs and ESTs -- it's possible that we may be seeing a VH dupe wave.

Would it not make more sense that these pets come from hacked accounts?

The OP stated in the WoW forum that they don't know how the duping process works. We do know that accounts are hacked, looted and their contents are sold. One thing about pets is they can easily be moved to other servers which makes them attractive to sell.

It's also one of the points I was trying to make in the duped vs stolen thread. I would think that some people would be resistant to buy stuff that has been stolen. But if it's labeled duped, then somehow it becomes fair game. And since there is no known mechanism to dupe a non TCG pet, it's a lot more likely that these are stolen pets.

Either way, buying these pets just sends the signal to the bad guys that they will be rewarded for their efforts.

Harpua wrote:Would it not make more sense that these pets come from hacked accounts?

The OP stated in the WoW forum that they don't know how the duping process works. We do know that accounts are hacked, looted and their contents are sold. One thing about pets is they can easily be moved to other servers which makes them attractive to sell.

It's also one of the points I was trying to make in the duped vs stolen thread. I would think that some people would be resistant to buy stuff that has been stolen. But if it's labeled duped, then somehow it becomes fair game. And since there is no known mechanism to dupe a non TCG pet, it's a lot more likely that these are stolen pets.

Either way, buying these pets just sends the signal to the bad guys that they will be rewarded for their efforts.

this is another strong possibility and I have to agree with you buying it only encourages more of it,also, remember beginning late in the expansion and no new content a lot of people have taken breaks from the game a great time for the account hackers to attack.some might not even know they have been hacked for a while

Harpua wrote:We do know that accounts are hacked, looted and their contents are sold.

Do we? Bliz doesn't give us any statistics on how many accounts get hacked. So this is just another possibility that we can't properly evaluate. Ie we have to take it on faith that account hacking contributes to the pet supply.

The evidence doesn't support it. If compromised accounts are to blame, then why are some pets targeted and some left alone? Is it really possible that 100 new VHs showed up from hacked accounts, but none of those accounts had Tuskarr Kites? And if the VHs are from hacked accounts, why are they all level 1? Is it really possible that none of those accounts leveled their VH to 25 or somewhere in between?

Harpua wrote:Either way, buying these pets just sends the signal to the bad guys that they will be rewarded for their efforts.

True, but the issue I have with this is: are they really that bad? Who are they hurting? Well, they're hurting anyone who bought a VH at a pre-dupe price, because those 'legit' VHs are now worth far less. Otherwise, they are just producing cheap goods that we want to buy.

Obviously the current situation is bad overall. But who's to blame? Bliz made very rare pets that command high prices. We buy them for high prices, then dupers make more of those pets, and the price drops. Bliz does nothing to stop this: they won't even admit that it happens. If Bliz won't enforce the value of these high-end pets, then the sad fact is that they don't have value. In those circumstances, I have no incentive to pay a premium for a 'legit' pet.

I haven't seen any in the Alliance or Horde AHs for Trollbane US yet. There have been offers for both the Spectral Tiger Cub and Vicious Horror in the trade chat from the same person on the Alliance side and another on the Horde side. Both are level one characters. It seems more than a little fishy that someone(s) are trying to sell both, so I'll pass.

Dolz wrote:I haven't seen any in the Alliance or Horde AHs for Trollbane US yet. There have been offers for both the Spectral Tiger Cub and Vicious Horror in the trade chat from the same person on the Alliance side and another on the Horde side. Both are level one characters. It seems more than a little fishy that someone(s) are trying to sell both, so I'll pass.

I have seen this phenomenon repeatedly over the last week or so. When I offered to buy a spectral tiger cub for 5k more than the 40k they were asking, if they would put it on the AH, I got ignored. It is always a lvl 1, usually with a bogus name same prices for hours and always 'selling' a spectral tiger cub and a vicious horror.

I don't know why people keep saying it is easy to google and find out how to dupe something. I have googled it many times and have only every found speculation on how to dupe and never anyone who can say how they do it. Also today there are about 200 VH's across US servers both Alliance and Horde totalled together. But there are 1000 EST yes 1000 Soul-Traders!!! This really ridiculous for anyone (me included) that paid much more gold (I'll say more market value) for either a VH or an EST.

Harpua wrote:If the OP's attitude towards exploiting is representative of the board in general, I want nothing more to do with this site.

That's needlessly harsh. My attitude is that exploiting happens (duping specifically). Your attitude seems to be that we should feel bad if we buy a duped pet, or if we discover that a pet we bought is a dupe. I disagree completely. Duping is a huge problem, but we are absolutely not to blame. Bliz doesn't prevent duping; they don't remove the dupes; and they don't give us any tools to distinguish 'legit' pets from dupes.

Some perspective: I have all the BoE pets, and they're all 'legit', except for my Spectral Tiger Cub. I bought a lvl 6 for 180k last June. Obviously it's a dupe, but that was before I was even aware of pet duping. I spent a long time worrying whether it would be taken away, and then when I realized Bliz wasn't doing anything about the dupes, I watched as the value of that cub rapidly dropped to 60k. I'm bitter about that, and I have strong opinions as a result.

*Nobody* should feel bad about buying dupes. Bliz has created the current environment: we are playing by their rules. They don't police dupes, and it is not our responsibility to do it for them.

I am kinda new to this but how can you tell a dupe? I am just at the beginning of starting my collection and have bought many pets from auction houses and also got many from tcg loot cards and sold on a few duplicates as well. I knew that people's accounts could be hacked etc but I thought that was the whole point of authenticators? I am just alarmed that all this goes on right now I am saving to buy pets from the auction house that you get from raids as I don't participate in them so that's the only way I will get them into my collection.

I just thought that if blizzard knew this was going on they would out something in place to counteract it???

That's the thing, you can't. There's many legit players who might buy a pet from someone who bought a pet from someone, etc., and aren't knowingly trying to pass off a pet of questionable origin.

The best you can do is keep an eye out for threads like this, that are letting players know that there might be something shady going on. And remember that if a deal sounds way too good to be true, it probably is. If someone with some gibberish name is trade barking "WTS 10x Viscous Horror skype petduper" then I would wager those are probably not legitimate pets.

I have had 5 loot cards in some packs and had difficulty with the codes and blizzard asked me to photocopy the front and back of them and send it to them . After a few days I got a reply back with instructions and seemingly it must have been my error putting the codes in all five worked . I sold some on the auction house and have kept the original cards just incase anyone ever asked for them , I am weary of buying wow cards via eBay and amazon etc and luckily get them from a shop direct , I have been tempted to buy some pets with real money but as you say if it sounds too good to be true it prob is

You can't tell, because there's literally no difference. Once a Soul-Trader is created, it is identical to every other Soul-Trader. If you happen to buy a duped version from AH, there's virtually no chance it will be confiscated or anything like that. The real problem is that dupes flood the market and devalue the legit pets.

Also, since duping is restricted to ingame items (and Bliz won't admit that it happens), the ingame versions of these pets have become much much cheaper than the real-world TCG cards that create them. A year ago, EST and spectral tiger cub were routinely $200-300 on ebay, and 200k-300k on AH. Today EST and cub are down to 40-60k on AH, but the ebay prices have not come down as quickly: people are still trying to sell EST for $200+, and cub for $120+. Those sellers undoubtedly are waiting for a buyer who is willing to pay extra for a 'legit' version, either because that buyer is unaware of duping or afraid that buying ingame is too risky.

And again, this is completely *not* the buyer's fault, because Bliz either can't or won't stop duping and they won't admit that it happens. So Bliz makes it very difficult for buyers to inform themselves about the true ingame value of these pets.

There is no way to tell it is a dupe on an individual basis.. the only evidence is when stuff like this happens and the price drops quickly for no reason.

The spectral tiger cub was a different story. You could tell your cub was NOT duped if it was level 1. The process to create a dupe required you to fight a pet battle, which resulted in the duped cub being level 6.

Unfortunately there have been more recent waves of Spectral Tiger Cub dupes, so level 1 is no longer a guarantee that it's not a dupe.

Interestingly, cub/EST/VH supply on AH has dropped by nearly 50% since I last posted. And the prices are not nearly as uniform. I wonder if a banning wave just happened (coincidentally or not, they took down mobile AH in the past couple days too).